It's increasingly rare for Congress to actually pass bills into law, but Friday brought some good news from Capitol Hill: More than a year after the exemption covering phone unlocking expired and a White House petition on the topic collected some 114,000 signatures, a narrow bill offering a limited carve-out for consumers unlocking phones made its way to the President's desk to be signed into law.

As a refresher: the notion that phone unlocking might violate copyright law comes from an ill-conceived section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that prevents the circumvention of technical measures around copyrighted works. If such measures are understood to include restrictions on phone software, then unlocking may violate the DMCA—an outcome Congress never intended.

EVENT TODAY: We're taking this day to educate people about the threats of DRM and the current policy challenges we face around DRM. We just completed a live video discussion at 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT to learn more about these fights and what we can do to take back our rights to control over the digital media and devices that we own. EFF Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz, International Director Danny O'Brien, and Global Policy Analyst Maira Sutton were featured on this live discussion moderated by Activist April Glaser.

Congress is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a "phone freedom" bill that is supposed to help solve the cell phone unlocking problem. We're all for phone freedom and we wish we could support the bill. Unfortunately, however, the costs for users outweigh the benefits.